Just to revisit a point I brought up in the original announcement at bsdforums:

Although word of mouth has been effective so far in getting regulars on board, there will obviously need to be much more done to get the word out about daemonforums. * Specifically, this site needs to get way, way up on the list of search engine results for "bsd forum", et al, in order to attract new traffic.

Please let us know how we can help.

* This presumes - and I am hoping - that you are intending to create a forum where bsd users of all levels can come to ask good questions and get help. If this is intended to be a l33t hangout (no offense intended), then I suppose it does not matter.

Agreed. A posting on the PC-BSD forum would be appropriate, as would an announcement on various BSD mailing lists. OSNews, Slashdot and some of the related sites should notified. You might also seek a mention on the FreeBSD home page, in the Media news section perhaps.

This presumes - and I am hoping - that you are intending to create a forum where bsd users of all levels can come to ask good questions and get help.

DaemonForums is, without a doubt, 100% help-oriented. We hope to accomplish as much as BSDForums and more in this area.

Quote:

there will obviously need to be much more done to get the word out about daemonforums

Yes, indeed. We started working on that even before DaemonForums was announced on BSDForums. We are contacting all of the news and community/support listings on the web to help spread the word. (Including all the official and unofficial *BSD news resources)

Quote:

Specifically, this site needs to get way, way up on the list of search engine results for "bsd forum", et al, in order to attract new traffic

You are exactly right. Getting high up on the search results will be the #1 factor in determining the long-term success of these forums. New users can not get help if they can not find us. Unfortunately, we do not have the money to bribe Google to make us their number one listing for a "BSD Forums" search. The greatest factor in achieving this will be simply more threads and more posts. Over time, when the search engine bots begin seeing that "BSD" and "forums" occurs thousands of times throughouts our pages, we will begin to rise in the search results. See: How Search Engines Rank Webpages.

I could look into acquiring deamonforums.net vase via hostmonstaer and donating it to the effort.

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I think the one angle that's not been considered (or perhaps I've missed it) is Google searches based on actual content (forum posts that address specific issues of interest to someone searching), instead of Google searches based on terms like "bsd" and "forums".

Example- so if someone googles for OpenBSD and VPN's, perhaps this site would pop up in the results referencing a guide someone recently published here about such an animal... and hopefully that result would be higher in the results than some other sites with the same relative amount of relative content, thus giving this site more exposure and hopefully as a result, driving more traffic here.

The way to enhance this is to generate and submit a sitemap to Google. It's part of their webmaster tools, which include other neato things to help bring up the popularity of this site without having to spend $$$ or have crazy Google Ad Sense ads. As they even instruct, when done automagically as part of a cron job, even the newest content on the site can be readily indexed in Google's monster brain, waiting for prospective new users of this site to pluck it.

If this has already been done, please forgive me for mentioning it. But if it hasn't, I can attest to the fact that it's pretty darn useful, and can drive more traffic here.

Perhaps the best thing to do would be a quick PM to Charles (assuming he's still active in the forums and not too busy with the PCBSD work) or another moderator--I say Charles, because, at least when I frequented those forums he was one of the nicest people there.
If he says yes, do it, if he says no, then don't.

As for DesktopBSD forums, we are lucky enough to have one of their main people here, so I'm sure he can decide if it's appropriate or not.

Perhaps the best thing to do would be a quick PM to Charles (assuming he's still active in the forums and not too busy with the PCBSD work) or another moderator--I say Charles, because, at least when I frequented those forums he was one of the nicest people there.

I don't know why but I haven't seen Charles in a long long long time there, shame to because he was a nice guy.

Having recently been assigned the duty... I think I'm the only moderator who still checks the forums regulary, Antik used to be on a lot but have not seen him in ages either. Might be busy with BSD Certification or some thing.

When I have any thing serious about the forums I usually E-Mail Kris Moore or Tim McCormick (the two lead developers). If you guys asked them you could probably get a formal link to daemonforums somewhere on the website.

OT:

Antik (moderator), DrJ, Dracheflieger, and DragnLord are people I've always respected and looked up to as my superiors on the PC-BSD forums when it comes to knowledge. The kind of people you learn from when they post or reply to something rather technical.

Sadly DragnLord is the only one I still see around the forums regularly :-(

*blush* I've not posted there for years because I found some of the more-opinionated but ill-informed regulars (not you) to be rude. These all are only operating systems, and not something to fight over.